Similarities Between The Islamic State And The Nazis Show Strategy To Defeat ISIS Must Change

On Monday, Europe once again witnessed an Islamic State attack on civilians. A 17-year-old ISIS terrorist attacked passengers with an ax on a train in Bavaria, Germany, seriously wounding five people. The terrorist was killed by German police.

A day later, Jerusalem Post editor Seth Frantzman compared the atrocities of the Islamic State and the response of the world to the Nazi era.

“In each of ISIS abuses the images of the Nazi period come to mind,” he wrote.

Frantzman says that the mass murder and slave trade by ISIS are not “spontaneous violence,” but carefully planned actions that are “much like the Nazi planning” that resulted in the elimination of European Jews.

The JPost editor believes there are similarities in the way the world responded to the rise of Hitler and the ensuing atrocities and genocide, and the reaction now to the rise of ISIS, their unspeakable cruelties and the genocide on minorities in Iraq by the Jihadist group.

He claimed that the local population in Mosul and other places in Iraq turned their back on the persecutions of the non-Muslim minorities in Iraq just like many people in Europe “were quiet collaborators with Nazism.”

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Frantzman also accused Westerners of quiet collaboration with ISIS.

“There has been quiescence in almost all Western states to the mass murder and cleansing of minorities in northern Iraq,” Frantzman wrote, adding that there has not been one protest against these mass murders in Western countries.

“More than 5,000 Europeans are estimated to have traveled to join ISIS, which is more than ever protested against ISIS,” the Israeli journalist wrote in his column.

Frantzman is right. Almost everyday media report on a new atrocity committed by ISIS but the response to these horrors is limited.

Take for example the reaction to revelations about unimaginable cruelties in the Bataclan Theater in Paris last November.

Last week, a French government committee heard testimonies of investigators and family members of the victims describing unspeakable cruelties by the three ISIS terrorists who entered the music hall during a concert of the Eagles of Death Metal.

British media reported on Sunday that the “terrorists gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths in the Bataclan Theater.”

One investigator told the committee that “bodies have not been presented to families because there were beheading people there, the murdered people, people who have been disemboweled.”

“There are women who had their genitals stabbed,” he testified.

Another investigator told the committee that police officers cried and vomited when they saw the mutilated bodies.

The most shocking thing was that French authorities appear to have suppressing the reports about the torture of victims and mutilations of the bodies. They probably did this to prevent public outrage and possible revenge attacks on the large Muslim majority in France.

There has been no public outcry or protests in France or elsewhere in Europe after the revelation about the unspeakable ISIS cruelties in the Bataclan Theater.

The same can be said about the ISIS massacre in Nice last week.

Some European commentators are still in a state of denial after this horrific attack on Western values by the Islamic State, while others try to whitewash the fact that the violence used by ISIS terrorists in Europe is related to their religious beliefs.

As for the war against ISIS in the Middle East, the only nation that has been ready to maximize their efforts against the Islamic State is the Kurdish nation.

“It is marvelous that the Kurds were able to blunt the ISIS blitzkrieg in 2014,” Frantzman wrote.

Indeed “marvelous” when one takes into account the fact that Kurdish Peshmerga militia in northern Iraq did not receive weapons or other support from the West at the time.

European countries and the United States have now become part of the front in the war against ISIS as the recent horrific attacks in Brussels, Orlando and Nice made clear. Yet, this has not led to a major overhaul in the strategy against the Islamic State.

France sent its largest warship to the Mediterranean Sea to increase the pressure on ISIS and the Obama administration sent an additional force of 550 U.S. Marines to Iraq.

Even Donald Trump made clear he is not prepared to send additional forces to Iraq and Syria, yet he expects to wipe out ISIS. He will fail, not because he does not realize what we are up against, he likely does.

To defeat ISIS, Europe and the U.S. should first acknowledge that they are at war with a force that is as dangerous as Nazi Germany was in World War II like the CIA warned more than two years ago.

In this respect it is important to read what blogger Yaacov Ben Moshe pointed out on the Breath of the Beast blog after the Nice massacre:

It is not about to stop. If we do not wake up and stop it it will kill you gladly. It will kill everyone you know and love and it will turn the entire world into exactly the kind of cauldron of mutilation, murder and horror that it has made of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Sudan, Nigeria and Libya.

Make no mistake; it has all but swallowed Europe and it is, as we sit here, wrapping its tentacles around North America.

It is not just about religion: It is a totalitarian system that embraces religion, law, morality and (most of all) culture.

“It is not just about a lone wolf. It is planned, advocated, inspired, supported in concert with a monstrous movement that wants to conquer the world,” Ben Moshe concluded.

The way ISIS is “indoctrinating children from birth through an extremism-based education is similar to that taught by the Nazi regime,” a study that was published last year revealed.

The Nazi’s were defeated by a huge army that was equipped with the most modern weapons that were available at the time. The United States did not limit itself to the training of Europeans or the delivery of weapons to local militia in order to defeat Hitler. It invaded the territories under Nazi control and did not stop until they had defeated Hitler’s army and eliminated the Nazi-leadership.

“The similarities between 1939 and 2015 are chillingly clear,” wrote the British paper The Sun at the end of last year. Nonetheless, the state of denial in the West continues.